An intergal part of our BML research is acurately locating specific lights seen on our various camera images. Knowing exactly what is visible in an image of distant objects is critical in determining exactly what a specific light might be. Our BML Cam1 is located atop a house on Jonas Ridge and has been running intermittently since February 2013. It is pointed southeast toward Brown Mountain, which lies 7 miles away. While the camera's field of view was manually changed a few times last year, it remained constant during 2014, except for some minor high-wind shaking. The following image shows 11 seperate very-acurate line-of-sight azimuths that allow us to better understand the location of lights that are visible within the camera's field of view. Distortion of the image due to the curvature of the camera lens is obvious from the unequal increments of degrees horizontally across the image.
Accurately measured line-of-sight azimuths in degrees
for BML Cam1 (Jonas Ridge)
Note that these lines of sights include prominent geographic landmarks, fortuitous Moon rises, airports/heliports where lighted aircraft were photographed landing or taking off, and our own staged light tests at known sites on Brown Mountain. Various software programs were used to measure the azimuths correctly. The majority of the lights beyond Brown Mountain are those of Lenoir and some of the communities immediately south of town. However some tall communication tower lights of Statesville are visible on the far horizon near the middle of the image. Only the northern-most 1/4 of Brown Mountain itself is visible within the camera's field of view and the city of Hickory is out of view far to the south (right).
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